Scoring Small, Crucial Wins Against Trump’s Deportation Regime

WANT TO KNOW WHAT A WIN for liberalism looks like in the Trump administration? Sometimes you can spot it in the things that are not said.

Last month, Republicans floated a strategy for this year’s midterm elections that could be summarized as instructing their candidates to stop saying “mass deportations.” It was an admission that Trump’s anti-immigrant zealotry had become a liability with voters and that acts of pushing back can actually work.

Those acts are visible now both on the national stage and in communities across the country. One of the latest instances appeared last weekend: a fight against new border-wall construction that threatens to rip up the beloved Big Bend National Park.

The crowd of more than 2,000 people of all political affiliations—including many who wouldn’t normally participate in a political protest—gathered on the steps of the Texas State Capitol to deliver one message: Not in our backyard.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Cesar Blanco told me he was heartened to see the strong response to the planned construction, including the flood of letters his office had received from constituents sharing stories to underscore what Big Bend means to them.

“We’re living in interesting times,” Blanco said. “We had Republicans and Democrats coming together, people who aren’t involved in politics from different walks of life who showed up with a message of let’s not destroy this beautiful treasure we have for a wall that is ineffective. We heard from land owners who have concerns on eminent domain, people who are campers and hikers, and river rafters who are concerned, and folks who care about wildlife, which a wall would impact.”

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A crowd of a few thousand people—some motivated by a love of flora—is never going to get the headlines of a multi-million person national rally against Trump’s authoritarianism. But don’t discount its significance. Trump’s numbers on immigration have taken a dive not just because of a massive national shift in sentiment as people have seen what his mass-deportation regime looks like in practice but also because of steady pockets of resistance like this. People in local communities have been quietly opposing Trump throughout his second term. And as support for his handling of immigration continues to wane, that open opposition has grown louder and become more emboldened.

A CNN poll released last week found that in addition to Trump’s approval rating on the economy hitting a new low, 55 percent of Americans said he had gone too far in pursuing mass deportations. When it came to the DHS funding impasse and the resulting government shutdown that created interminably long lines at airports and left TSA workers without pay, 39 percent blamed Republicans while a quarter blamed Democrats; 28 percent said both groups shared equal blame. When asked whether Trump sending ICE agents to airports helped things, 40 percent said it made things worse, while 21 percent said it improved the situation.

This polling came after a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents, also conducted in late March and released April 1, found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of both Trump’s handling of nationwide protests against his immigration policies and the investigation of the killing of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal agents.

Trend lines also show support dropping for specific controversial policies. Those in favor of deporting people to countries they are not from fell from 20 percent last July to 13 percent today, while support for separating kids from their immigrant parents has fallen a comparable amount, from 18 percent last April to 11 percent now.

But again, the national numbers don’t tell the full story. To understand the full extent of the deteriorating environment for Trump on immigration, you need to drill down to what is happening in local towns and cities. I recently reported on DHS’s preparations to spend $38 billion overpaying for warehouses intended to house up to 10,000 immigrants; companies have been backing out of those deals after facing intense scrutiny from local municipalities and local residents who didn’t want detention centers in their backyards. Some local city governments even passed zoning ordinances to stop ICE’s plans for mass detention center, and in a small town in Georgia, the city manager put a lock on the water meter pending the agency’s demonstration that its planned facility won’t put undue strain on local infrastructure.

During the long days, weeks, and months of the second Trump administration, these are what wins often look like—not massive, decisive victories, but rather delaying, slowing, and jamming the gears of the mass-deportation machine instead of letting it roll unimpeded into your town.

DILLEY, TEXAS IS THE SITE of other recent attempts to stall the deportation machine. The town’s detention center came to national attention after Liam Ramos—the boy who you’ll remember was wearing his blue bunny hat in a heartbreaking photo—was taken with his father from their home in Minnesota and shuttled 1,200 miles away to be incarcerated there. The pressure has been constant to release the families and children at Dilley. They have told loved ones and reporters about their harrowing struggles with securing access to prescribed medicine, clean water, and food. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter published a story about a recent petition for the detention center to be closed; over the past month, it reached 215,000 signatures, including those of a bevy of celebrities including Jodie Foster, Ben Stiller, Pedro Pascal, Madonna, and Javier Bardem.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who has already helped to secure the release of some families and children from the facility including Ramos and his dad, has continued to put pressure on the detention center in Dilley, not just by getting detainees released but by doing regular